Blogs

Last week I attended Strata + Hadoop World 2014 in New York. Here are some of my notes.

grunt-ssh is a small Grunt plugin that provides SSH and SFTP tasks using the excellent pure JS implementation of ssh2. Since I first released it in February 2013 it has been downloaded over 33,000 times, and 22 people have contributed to it.

I’m writing quite a bit of Java at the moment. Most of the time I can use Java 7, but unfortunately some must still be written in Java 6 as they need to run on old RedHat servers. Soon, I want to look at Java 8.

Great post on the Box tech blog on how they deal with system outages, starting with how they used to deal with them and what they have done to improve things, which has now lead to less severe outages and improved system availability.

I wanted to perform some user load testing on the HTTP endpoint of our internal metrics collection system. After a bit of googling I decided to use Locust.

I went to see The other side of the medal: how Germany saw the First World War exhibition at the British Museum today. Very interesting and well worth seeing.

A quick tip I worked out today. If you are using the excellent Minimal Reader for your RSS feeds and want to quickly subscribe using the RSS Subscription Extension in Chrome, go to the extensions options page and add a new feed reader using this as the URL.

I noticed in my Nginx logs that a number of sites were serving my jQuery Placeholder Plugin JavaScript files directly from my site, as opposed to hosting it themselves. Probably an accident, but still…

After a few years with the same design, I fancied a change. This is how it looked previously¹:

I’ve just finished reading HHhH, by Laurent Binet. An excellent novel based on an thrilling, and true story.